There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.

Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.

All my friends' mothers were appalling women.

All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed.

When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.

When old settlers say 'One has to understand the country,' what they mean is, 'You have to get used to our ideas about the native.' They are saying in effect, 'Learn our ideas, or otherwise get out; we don't want you.'

For there is never any way to go but in.